Fenway Park Ski Jump Takes the Place of Green Monster for Big Air Competition

(Twitter/@FenwayPark)

By    |   Thursday, 11 February 2016 08:33 AM EST ET

Fenway Park's new 140-foot ski jump constructed for this week's Big Air at Fenway U.S. Grand Prix looks more imposing that the baseball stadium's famous Green Monster in left field.

Some of the country's best free skiers and snowboarders will come to one of baseball's shrines Thursday and Friday to compete in front of more than 20,000 people, according to Fox Sports. The slope soars higher at the stadium's highest seats and drops at 38 degrees where athletes are launched 52 feet in the air.

"The concept of putting this stadium inside Fenway Park on this hallowed ground is a bodacious concept, and it's come together," Calum Clark, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association vice president of events, told NESN Wednesday.

Nick Goepper, who won a bronze medal at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, told NESN that having the unique chance to ski in the middle of Boston in front of big crowd is "really, really cool."

"To be here in the middle of downtown, in one of the most iconic sports venues in the entire world is an incredible opportunity," he said. "And it brings the sport to tons and tons of people. There's a lot of people that watch, just people that have never seen this."

"There's not even that many people that showed up to the X Games, which is like the biggest event for us. And then we're going to have, I hear numbers like 20,000 [people] and I'm like, 'Wow. I've never skied in front of that many people before,'" Goepper added.

Big Air organizers told the Boston Globe
the idea behind events such as the Fenway Park competition is to grow the sport by taking it out of mountain resorts and bringing it to urban areas.

"When people see it in person in Boston, they're going to be like, 'This is crazy,'" snowboarder Eric Beauchemin told the newspaper. "It's going to grow from there. Having it in big cities makes more people aware of the sport, gets people interested in following the sport."

Fenway Park posted a number of photos and Vine videos on its website from practice jumps this week.






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Fenway Park's new 140-foot ski jump constructed for this week's Big Air at Fenway U.S. Grand Prix looks more imposing that the baseball stadium's famous Green Monster in left field.
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Thursday, 11 February 2016 08:33 AM
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